Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Main menu

Post navigation

Women’s Sports

The other day, Steve Sailer had a post about the WNBA and various ways to make the sport more attractive to sports fans. I pointed out that the main issue is spatial awareness, as men are more abstract in modeling their environment, while women are more concrete. Knowing where the herd is going to be when going on a hunt is different than remembering where the berries are when going on a pick. The part of the brain, which controls the perception of speed and the mental ability to rotate 3-D objects, is larger in men as well.

Anyone who has tried to watch women’s basketball understands that it is terrible in just about every way imaginable. Basketball is about speed, jumping and obviously shooting. Fans go to NBA games to see freaks of nature, who can leap from the top of the key and dunk the ball over some other freak. The women’s game is described as low and slow, meaning the style of play is pretty much the opposite of what fans of basketball want to see. The girls look like they are nailed to the floor most of the time.

Of course, in a sane world we would not demand that girls do all the same things men do, but we no longer live in a sane world. Even with the lunacy, there used to be popular TV sports for women that got good ratings. Women’s figure skating used to be a big deal, often put on against football and basketball. The logic was that men would watch football and their wives would watch skating, which was usually the case. Twenty years ago figure skating had better ratings than the NCAA basketball tournament, head to head.

Skating used to be a ratings monster for TV, but that’s no longer true. Today, not even the big events get on TV. Not only have ratings collapsed, but interest in youth figure skating is at an all-time low. Something similar has happened to gymnastics. It used to be that everyone knew the name of the top female gymnasts. Every Olympiad there was an American ready to take her place in the long line great female gymnasts. Today, Simone Biles would have to rob a bank in order for people to know her name.

You can even extend this decline in women’s sports to tennis and golf. The former was huge into the 90’s, but it has fallen on hard times. Women’s golf was never wildly popular, but golf junkies would watch the big events. The big stars were known to casual fans. Tennis still has the William’s sisters, but their popularity is based solely on their value as props in the culture war. Golf has no stars that anyone can name. The top US player is Lexi Thompson, whose name in a google search generates less than a million hits. Sandy Leon, a backup catcher, generates 17-times that number.

Now, all of these sports can point to various reasons for why they have fallen off the map in our culture. Figure skating and gymnastics has been plagued by weirdos and a culture that makes beauty pageants seem mild mannered. Women’s basketball was never popular and sports like golf and tennis have been in decline for a generation. There’s also a demographic issue. Popular female sports tended to be popular with boomers, who had kids. As the Boomers age off, their interest in these things has declined.

Even so, there’s no getting around the fact the female sports are at their lowest in terms of spectator interest. It could indicate a decline in women participating in competitive sports. It is impossible to get reliable numbers on this as the Title IX crazies are worse than the climate change nuts when it comes to fake data. Youth participation in sports has been in steady decline for decades so perhaps the declining interest in sport among the young is showing up first in the least popular spectator sports.

There’s also the possibility that biology is returning serve in the multicultural war on reality we have witnessed the last few decades. Women are wired to compete with one another in order to gain the attention of men. Our competitive sports are designed by men for men. It could simply be that the long war against femininity is coming to a bad end for the culture warriors. The girls would rather watch other girls be catty with one another in a TV drama than watch sweaty lesbians fight over a ball.

That would not explain the the decline in things like figure skating and gymnastics, but perhaps those were just early casualties in the feminist war on reality and as the fever breaks, these sports will make a comeback. These things also go in cycles so as the more reactionary Generation Z reach adulthood and start having families, perhaps sensible activities for girls will make a comeback. This is something you notice when looking at the social media of young alt-right types. They appear to be attracted to more traditional sex roles, despite the howling from their parents.

I actually used to watch women’s pro-volleyball back in the 80’s. That sport died with Flo Hyman.

One thing that makes it watchable is they simply lower the net half a foot for the ladies – so it doesn’t look as ridiculous as women’s basketball. Doesn’t hurt that female volleyball players are often attractive.

Matriarchy isn’t the Patriarchy no matter how they dress it up.
It’s nothing when the cultural marxist attempt Kubaki theater like WNBA.
That is the whole point. Emasculation of real Men and real Women.
They are trying to whittle enemies of their ideology down so one day hopefully nobody is left to fight them.
And they wonder why the Vag in a pantsuit lost?

From what I can see, middle class and better white parents do a lot of sports (or dance) with their daughters because it plumps up the college resume and keeps teenaged girls in a relatively healthy, wholesome environment doing something tiring so they don’t get into trouble. Another activity that offered this would probably be welcomed, particularly for those with unathletic daughters. You can’t have teenaged girls around every afternoon and weekend unsupervised, so a job or family duties or youth theater or something has to be there.

My neighbor and good friends put 3 of their girls through college on full-ride soccer scholarships. All three got worthless degrees, married and got careers in nothing to do with their degrees. Title XI and it’s twisted effects on higher education is stunning to me, but I’m old. Universities are run by women, and women attend at higher rates than men. But it’s not enough! They demand moar!! Because…. because!

The stupid thing about Title Nine requirements is that boys are vastly more interested in sports than girls are. This starts in childhood, where boys will organize spontaneous games of soccer or baseball and continues into adulthood. Absent mandates, a small university could probably field several men’s basketball or soccer teams, allowing less capable but interested athletes to play. My college had a number of non school sponsored men’s sports teams because demand for slots on teams significantly outstripped supply. The players would fundraise for their own uniforms and supplies and organize matches with other schools and so on. Meanwhile… Read more »

I recall an argument from a Title IX supporter. It went something like this: Girls are just as interested in sports participation as boys. They just don’t realize it. They must be told (or sold) that it is OK to want to participate.

Now that you bring it up, Marina, when I was eight years old (this would be Eisenhower’s second heart attack), myself and a gaggle of other yuts of similar age attacked a wild field just behind our new development, tore up the weeds and bushes, cut down a few trees, picked up bushels of rocks, and shoveled and raked for a week. We played baseball and football there for two years. We never saw an adult, or a girl.

And there USED to be certain rules about athletes taking “enhancement” drugs.
Well, special exceptions, in the name of “fairness” I suppose.
Weights around their ankles, and a separate set of “ladies” tees.

I had the same confusion. How ludicrous (but tragic for the real people involved) it all gets when the loonies think they can overrule Nature itself. Oh, but WE are the “anti-science” crowd, and the Left is the “reality-based” crowd. Uh-huh.

I can’t understand the parents of that trans-teen allowing her to compete period. Male or female. Trans commit suicide at a unacceptably high rate. She/he won the State title, but outside of her close friends and her adoring teachers, it will be ridicule … ” oh, you’re the one who won the girls title at State in ’17.” I cannot imagine how messed up her/his mind will be at 25. Crazy.

Drake, the kid wanted to and was unable to due to Texas law. You must compete with sex from your birth. Obviously, I would think when they passed that law/rule, this eventuality was not even considered. The girl has been taking massive testosterone for her change. That’s doping… BUT.. since we’re in the rabbit hole with the Mad Hatter, it’s all mixed up and no one can complain because the PC police will jump in. Heh. Social engineering , ain’t it great?

The problem with changing the rules of course is that some guy will decide he’s a chick and win the state championship easily. There was an episode of “Married with Children” in which Al was invited to an elderly olympics meet and had a great time beating down all the geezers. Funny how life imitates the most absurd art eventually.

Was a competitive rower until I was thirty. When we first started having coaches coming over from the Eastern bloc to coach the national teams and development camps a lot of us started developing all sort of overuse injuries from the new training loads. Turns out most of the athletes they worked with in Russia, Poland and East Germany were regularly doped–but it was compartmentalized from the coaches. So they simply thought that athletes could handle that sort of mileage and intensity. We could have, if we had regular low dose steroids to speed recovery. We were all clean, so… Read more »

I recall reading about how many of the women from the DDR sports teams had horrible lives after their career. The physical damage and the psychological damage was severe. There’s long been a suspicion that steroid abuse results in long term psychological effects on men. We know, for example, that very low testosterone levels can result in depression and suicide. Steroid abuse destroys the body’s natural production of testosterone so guys who go off the gear will suddenly be faced with a new problem, that is remedied by taking steroids, ironically. Whether there are changes in brain chemistry that far… Read more »

Back then, a comedy show on late nights here in the US did a skit where the East German swim team was a bunch of very hairy muscular dudes in drag. I think if you are Gen X or older, the whole “East German Women” thing is very well known.

I read that in 2013, “…167 former DDR athletes would be financially compensated through Germany’s Olympic Committee for the systematic doping of DDR athletes from 1973 through 1989. When told of this fact, Shirley Babashoff’s first comment was, “Only 167 Athletes!” whole article here … https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/dopings-darkest-hour-the-east-germans-and-the-1976-montreal-games/ The final relay for the women in Montreal – the 4×100 free – was a throwdown moment in swimming – a sport with a dearth of such things. It’s on youtube but the video is not great and the camera shots focus primarily on the USA team so you can’t gauge the size differential.… Read more »

A boy-to-girl transgenderite just won a championship in Texas, pinning everybody along the way. This will happen more and more until all the athletes in women’s sports will be men. This sets up the clash between feminism and transgenderism, which itself will be way more fun to watch than the WNBA. I predict the transgenderites will win because they are stronger and better at math, critical thinking and PR. At that point all sports will be all men all the time, which will require the government to pass Title 9 1/2, mandating equal participation for “real” girls. Then the cycle… Read more »

Yeah, it was a girl to boy. To her/his credit, she/he/it wanted to compete as a boy, but they made it compete as a girl (since that’s how it was born). But the testosterone it was taking as part of the treatment undoubtedly gave it a huge advantage over the girls.

It’s just a matter of time until it goes the other way, and the lawsuits start demanding equal access. When the boys can “identify” a certain way just to gain a competitive advantage, you’ll see whatever self-righteous piety flowing from women evaporate.

In Massachusetts if you have a boy who wants to play field hockey, and you don’t have a boys’ team you MUST let him play on the girls’ team. I can’t fathom it. People will say that girls play on boys’ teams- ice hockey in particular, but they are not equivalent. I really don’t think girls should be on boys’ teams period, but at least, if I had a daughter I would be making the decision to put her on the ice with biggerstrongerfaster boys. The other field hockey parents made no such decision, but there is their daughter playing… Read more »

Poor social justice warriors. How do we raise the ratings of women’s sports since everyone knows that women should be paid the same as men for the same work? I have a suggestion. Let women play topless. I am from Texas and was unaware of the wrestling tranny until I visited relatives and got something on the news. I then read about it the next day in the paper. Amazing. First of all, I wasn’t even aware that there was wrestling for girls except in venues with large amounts of mud. Only parents and pervs would watch. But, I saw… Read more »

Granted this was a while ago, 2004, but I was a volunteer at the Women’s US golf open. I was amazed at how good looking many of the players were- and how fashionable . The first golfer I say after getting out of my car was Suzanne Petersen – VA VA Voom!

They’ve gotten better looking over the years (excluding some of the heavy block-like Asians), but I don’t think going “topless” is playing to their strengths. Most good women golfers have pretty small hooters – big ones impede a good golf swing.

Back when I used to do archery I soon noted, being male and aware of certain areas of female anatomy, that women archers often wore a kind of mesh ‘suppressor’ over one breast so drawing a bow was not impeded. Archers at club level were always mixed with male and female shooting together and even people with disabilities were there too. I recall a certain annoyance from some that the guy in the wheelchair not only had much bigger muscles in his arms and shoulders (understandably so) but had a sort of more stable shooting position. Fully abled had a… Read more »

Skating is too white. Remember the last big coverage was back when a black girl was in contention. Watch what happens to tennis when the Williams sisters are gone. WNBA–a bunch of black lesbians–as long as it’s like this they’ll get attention out the wazoo, no sign of that ever changing. It will be on TV even if no one at all is watching. They give tickets to local organizations and businesses to get folks to go to the local NBA and WNBA games. If it weren’t for TV contracts they’d be broke. Cable cutting will be the death of… Read more »

Also, figure skating used to be a thing of grace and beauty, including the music. The last time I watched, it seemed near porn set to raucous sound. Maybe it’s just my ‘old fart’ showing, but even my wife has given up on it and she used to be a faithful watcher, at least for the olympics. Seems the Hollywood elite culture coarsens everything it touches.

what has greatly parcipitated the drop in womens figure skating popuarity among whites or the very few blacks is the rise in popularity of womens ice hockey. Go to any rink, most asian girls you see will be the figure skaters; many of the American girls you see there will have hockey skates, pads, lids & twigs (helmets & hockey sticks, for the uninitiated). much as very few guy skaters would even think of lacing up figure skates (frankly, because that would be gay) so now the ladies.

I think you’re right. I skate regularly here in San Francisco, and almost all the girls on the ice for the early morning before school sessions are Asian, mainly Chinese. There are a couple of white girls, and they are Russian. The lone boy is around 12 years old and he is Vietnamese. Over the span of the 6 years that I’ve been at the rink, the number of young white girls strapping on the padding and working hard in the hockey clinics has increased. Figure skating killed the golden goose in the mid-90s by overexposure. You couldn’t turn the… Read more »

They changed the scoring system several years ago to reduce the subjectivity. So the way to do well now is to do as many elaborate jumps and spins as possible, rather than skate beautifully. The programs are much less pretty to watch now.

I remember at a Vikings-Packers game at Lambeau one Vikings fan holding up a sign that said “Hey Green Bay, where’ s YOUR WNBA championship?”
Like much of modern life, women’s sports have taken something good and made it into something ridiculous. Opening up opportunities for girls to experience the joys of competition was probably good, making it compulsory was not. “All that’s not forbidden is compulsory!!”

I. for one, welcome the end of all women’s sport by the forced participation of “trans-gendered” “men”. No biological women will ever win a major sporting event again once the Left gets its way on this point.

I think the fall of women’s gymnastics and skating is in large part a delayed consequence of the end of the Cold War. Nobody really cares anymore whether our female athletes beat the Russians, (East) Germans, Bulgarians, Romanians, etc. Or even the Chinese. The Olympics seemed to drive the popularity of those sports, in my opinion.

That’s a possibility, but it was not so long ago that we had traveling ice shows that sold out big arenas. Women loved taking their daughters to those things. Now they are all gone. I think your point works much better for gymnastics, which has always been an every four year thing.

Yeah, we had the Ice Capades, which were popular with women. But, at least in my adult lifetime, and maybe even when I was a teen in the late 70s, the main attractions always seemed to be popular and well known only as a result of being Olympic medalists. Gave them a vehicle to keep skating and monetize their Olympic success.

Women’s sports are generally uninteresting because men’s high school teams are far superior to women’s professional teams. Why watch something that is just inferior? Particularly awful is the WNBA, where the absence of upper body strength (50% less than men), jumping ability, and speed turns the game into a travesty…

I used to have a pretty dim view of figure skating, but my wife has always loved it. For her birthday, I took her to Skate America which was a big national competition that was in our neighborhood. I’ll tell you what, I went in with one idea of figure skating and left with another one. First, the competitors you see on TV Scott Hamilton and Dick Button, represent about 1/10th of the competitors. The other 9/10ths don’t get on television. Why? Because they fall down. A lot. But the thing you don’t get to see – or rather, hear… Read more »

It’s what I tell people about boxing. Go to an armory fight and you walk away with a very different view of boxing. Rodeo is another that has to be seen live to have any clue about what happens. TV both sanitizes and distorts.

Yep. Been on the ice when a kid catches their toe pick and slams into the boards coming out of a serious jump. It’s painful to watch. Especially if they’re working on a particularly difficult jump and their coach is getting them to do it over and over. By about the fourth time falling hard they get up very slowly.

I’ve fallen hard enough to bruise and send shock waves across the ice. But then I’m a middle-aged woman with a bit more meat on my bones than those kids. Nevertheless it hurts like hell.

Btw, did you know that the boys high school track and field world records are higher, faster, and farther than most (if not all) of the women’s world records? That shouldn’t be too surprising, but in our “everybody is all the same” age, it’s easy to lose sight of that. I remember being told that a few years ago, so I looked up both. Although I wasn’t terribly surprised, it was amusing when you consider that high school boys generally do not have the training regimen of olympic women athletes.

Zman, you could have said “Female athletes used to be featured on Wheaties boxes, now they could be on milk cartons.” But I think it is an interesting question: where have the female athletes gone? In many Olympic sports, the women’s record would not even qualify for the men’s event, that is, the women’s world record performance in the event would not meet the cut for the men’s event. Tennis players, across generations, have stated that tournament-winning female tennis players would be beaten easily by unranked men. And before anyone brings Bobby Riggs: Bobby Riggs was a very good tennis… Read more »

My suggestion at Sailer’s place was that women develop their own sports, I suggested Lace Tatting, Curtain Hanging and Long Distance Weeping.
One thing for sure, they are lousy at playing men’s sports, as this Australian bint admits.

Define the issue better. Is it trying to attract more female viewers for women’s sport or trying to attract more more male viewers?
If it is the latter the answer is attractive women moving around in skimpy costumes. That rules out WNBA, golf, and baseball. Skating, tennis, and Lingere Football have a chance. If its the former ask a woman, I can’t guess.

What’s killing ”Women’s” (little girls really) gymnastics and figure skating is the expense in both time and money. If married (and of course, with a job) the mothers simply don’t have enough spare time or energy to invest in lessons/training/travel/competition that gymnastics and figure skating require. Getting little Sally to all those several hour lessons/practice/training and then competitions is literally a full time job – unpaid, and in fact rather costly. If a ‘single’ Mom, she not only has even less time and energy, she also probably can’t afford the expenses involved. In Europe and Asia the promising young gymnasts… Read more »